For six months the Australian media has had the opportunity to research and report facts about the Gorby case, and it chose to instead heavily favour only one side of the story.
They whipped the public into a frenzy of hatred and xenophobia by choosing some facts and excluding others, and now anyone in Australia or vaguely looking in our direction can see the results.
So what are all the papers reporting now? The frenzy of the "lunatic fringe" among the vast crowd of "uninformed" Australians. For the first time, there is widespread reporting on the facts on the other side of the case, and media commentators are chastising the public for being unaware of them.
It's a situation that the media has fed since day one. It's not quite accurate to say they created it -- but they certainly gave the public what they wanted to hear, rather than what they needed to know.
So now we have a bunch of op-ed pieces blaming the media. Not their own medium, of course. The other media.
This is a situation that will not change until we all stop accepting what we read at face value. Frankenstein's monster is running rampant. Let's hope it does the right thing and kills its creator before anyone else gets hurt.
And all the pieces about the uneasy relations between Australians and Indonesians must be read with a large grain of salt. The two Governments have almost always been buddies since the West helped Suharto get in. Business on both sides has been doing a roaring trade. The militaries have been working together except for when the Australian Government reluctantly sent troops to East Timor. And the people who meet each other generally get along well enough. The real mistrust is between the bulk of the general public in both countries and the governments and militaries of both countries. And in general, people trust their own Governments and militaries more than someone else's. But not by much.
The Indonesian media seems to have reported on the Embassy package quite sensibly and without any of the hyperbole that accompanied the bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. So only their dumbass minority will be outraged. Unfortunately, like here, a few of their dumbasses are dangerous. All we can hope for is that their sane citizens educate their dumbasses, while we attempt the same at home.
But don't look to our popular media to aid us in that endeavour.